Greetings!

If any of the info on this website was useful for your projects or made your head spin with creative ideas, and you would like to share a token of your appreciation- a donation would be massively appreciated!

Your donation will go to my Robotics Fund, straight towards more sensors, actuators, books, and journeys. It takes a lot to continue building these robots, and I’m really thankful of everyone who helps encourage me along the way.

USD

CAD

“A wise robot once said to me through Serial.println- that robots teach us about ourselves.”

making new creatures

All posts tagged LEDs

Happy winter everyone and everybot! It’s a great season to enjoy many activities. For a robot, this is not just limited to being a robot snowplow. In this hack, we will be making Clyde into a winter themed connected cheerlights device! Watch the vid!

Check out all of the information over on Fabule’s blog. It goes through every step, from 3d printing the snowflakes, to the Processing sketch, and more. So go check it out!

Hope you enjoyed this last Clyde hack! It turned out to be quite a long hack, but the end result makes a great appearance with all of the blinking snowflakes and internet controlled eye.

It has been a blast creating these and evolving the creativity for each one. Thank you to Fabule for sponsoring this video series!

The behaviour for the tentacle mechanism has been difficult to figure out.

Our fist attempt was to use the outputs to communicate how many times the button should be pressed. At first, it was fun, but then it just becomes confusing. Sort of similar to: ‘Why is this thing doing this thing, what can I do to change it?’. You can watch a video of this here.

The next attempt was to use the ultrasonic sensor, and have different actions for each distance threshold. There are also ‘mini-actions’ that occur from the changes between these distances. So when you are interacting with it, the ‘dances’ that the tentacle does will be similar, but the introduction to that dance, LEDs blinking, will be different.

But in the code, it’s more than controlling the robot. There are ‘debug’ statements where the robot is saying things. It gives some context as to what the robot thinks is happening.

So as you can see, this robot has some sort of creepy obsession with distance.

And it gets even more interesting when the human goes away:

As for actually displaying the text to the humans, it might be nice to have a tiny OLED display at some distance away from the robot, that only lights up after some amount of time of interaction. This way the humans will pay more attention to the tentacle moving at first, then notice the display and keep interacting.

What is all this ‘be’ functions about in the code? Those are the ‘mini-actions’, as mentioned above. They just blink the LEDs in certain patterns and such. In a future robot, this will be more involved with the social drives/mind/emotions.

Taking long exposures of the tentacle moving has been quite fun. Here are some of my favourites:

Working on documenting it, there were a lot of lessons learnt while building this!